The New Wine of Jesus' Advent

The disciples of John the Baptist occasion an opportunity for Jesus to explain how his advent fundamentally changes the way that God’s people relate to him. There is a paradigm shift with the coming of Jesus, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the message. Rather, it changes our relationship to the message because it changes our relationship to the messenger. So, J.H. Bavinck summarizes Jesus’ response in v15 well when he writes, “[Jesus] wanted these disciples of John to see that religion is not a painful and trying [experience] but a wedding [feast]. Religious people, people who have actually found God, are not tormented souls but ‘wedding guests.’”[1] Following on that imagery of a wedding feast, Jesus explains that the old ways of doing and thinking cannot contain the fullness and effervescence of the revelation of God in himself, the realization of all God’s promises in the person and work of Jesus. Bringing the objection of the Baptist’s followers together with the imagery of new fabric and new wine, J.H. Bavinck comments, “The Savior speaks these parables to make the followers of John really feel how wrong it is to accommodate the teaching of John the Baptist to the customs and considerations of the Pharisees. Everything has its own form and dress. One sets a diamond in gold, not tin. There must be agreement between the contents and the form.  Every religious consideration also has its own practice; one cannot retain the old endeavors if one wants to receive the new.”[2] It is as futile to cling to old ways in the new age of the Spirit as it is to pour new wine into old wineskins. Such an effort only shows how one relates to the kingdom with “me” at the center rather than God; it shows how we order our lives according to our own wills rather than God’s will. The new has come, Jesus declares, and we must embrace it if we are going to be good citizens of the kingdom.

Importantly, this means that the paradigm shift is not from law to grace. The Sermon on the Mount has made it clear that Jesus in no way intends to do away with the law and the prophets, even by ushering in a new age of grace. Rather, the paradigm shift is located on the one hand in the heightening of the moral demands of the kingdom of heaven, on account of the arrival of the King (cf. Matt 5:48), and on the other hand in the outpouring of God’s mercy to those who are truly penitent, as evidenced in Jesus’ works, words, and identification as the one who ushers in the great and final Jubilee, a season of canceling debts and restoring rights (cf. Luke 4:16-21).[3] This means that the paradigm shift of which Jesus speaks is a shift away from a human centric view of the kingdom of God to a theocentric one. So, Herman Ridderbos comments, “It is the absolutely theocentric character of the kingdom which determines the contents of Jesus’ commandments.”[4] The opposition that Jesus faces, then, which leads up to his comments on new fabric and new wine is stuck in a human centric vision of the kingdom. But “God’s kingdom represents something higher than a hierarchy of human values and interests.”[5] Indeed, Jesus’ resistance to his objectors is foundationally a rejection of “a religion of which only the external phenomena, cultus, and ritual have been retained, and in which the heart is absent.”[6] After all, why object to the mercy that Jesus extends to the paralytic except that it breaks the human-centric religion of the Pharisees? Why object to the free invitation of tax collectors and sinners to be disciples except that it tears at the dead orthodoxy of the religious leaders? Why, even, object to feasting over fasting except that it explodes one’s ossified understanding of how to relate to God? In the end, Jesus’ vivid mental images of new fabric and new wine reinforce the theocentric character of the kingdom of heaven, which demands a submission of our own wills to the wonderful, and often unexpected, works of God.

[1] J. H. Bavinck, Geschiedenis der Godsopenbaring: Handboek voor de Kennis van de Bijbelsche Geschiedenis (J. H. Kok, 1938), 2:151.

[2] Bavinck, Geschiedenis, 2:151.

[3] Note that Jesus specifically looked for Isa 61:1 in order to read it and to declare its fulfillment in himself.

[4] Herman N Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, ed. Raymond O Zorn, trans. H. de Jongste (P&R Publishing, 1962), 287.

[5] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 288.

[6] Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom, 302.